The Higgs Boson: Steaming Particle of Bull$#!%

Bruno Maddox visited the Large Hadron Collider, and all he got was one lousy God Particle, a whole bunch of Swiss coffee, and infinite questions about the universe

So it’s been a month...wait, no, it’s been two months, and from the silence roaring suddenly out of Geneva one has to assume that physicists are still—still—trying to figure out if the subatomic particle lately glimpsed by the Large Hadron Collider really is the elusive "Higgs Boson" they’ve been hunting for half a century. Rolf-Dieter Heuer, the ABBA-looking dude who runs the Conseil Européene pour la Recherche Nucléaire, which built and maintains the LHC, was only comfortable saying in his July 4th press-conference that the new particle exhibits "Higgs-like" properties, but more research is needed—years of it, to be specific—before we’ll know for certain that this is the submicroscopic speck that’s famously not actually known as "The God Particle."

Given that no one so much as threw a shoe at Heuer during his maddening announcement, and that CERN’s facilities remain untorched, even unvandalized, two months later, what it is not too soon to say, however, is that physics would appear to have gotten away with it: a decades-long campaign of hype, propaganda, and outright deception that saw a ragtag bunch of social misfits swindle the world out of billions of dollars, monies which as of this writing have not been returned. What follows is the story, if not of an outright hoax, then at least of the most audacious and effective PR campaign in the history of science. Our tale begins in the early 1990s. A young George Bush Sr. is in the White House. The music world has been turned on its head for only the eighty-third time by an angry young man singing songs about being angry and young. In tennis, a young...

Oh, actually, fuck it. Let’s go all the way back.

In 1969, appearing before the Congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, a physicist named Robert Wilson was asked by one Senator John Pastore how exactly the fancy particle "accelerator" he wanted $250 million to build was going to enhance U.S. national security, it being the height of the Cold War and everything. Pastore’s question was a little mean. You’re not supposed to ask a physicist what the point of his work is, any more than you’re supposed to inform a mime that it really isn’t that windy. But Wilson rose to the occasion. Indeed, his reply probably ranks among the Top Five Most Boffo Comebacks in the whole history of congressional testimony, the kind of thing they show on looped rotation at the C-SPANZone in Times Square for tourists to stare at in silence over their nonpartisantinis.

"It has nothing to do directly with defending our country," Wilson admitted, hunching down into his gooseneck microphone the way you do. "Except to help make it worth defending."

Shpladow. With those seven perfect words, Wilson not only got his funding but solved a practical conundrum that had bedeviled subatomic physics since the field’s inception at the start of the twentieth century: how to extract incredible shitloads of money out of people with no hope of ever understanding why you need it. Prior to Wilson, supplicant physicists had made the mistake of trying to explain themselves. In airless committee rooms, before panels of orange-skinned creationists hard up against their nap times, they had ventured into the mysteries of the wave-particle duality... tried to give some sense of just how exciting it would be to finally see the quarks inside a proton... and came away empty-handed. Others had made a practical pitch for why they needed the money. It was near impossible, they’d argue, to build a cutting-edge particle accelerator without at some point having to develop a new diode, or superconducting transistor, or a new method for threading lots of wires through a single tube, and so, you know... give me half a billion dollars and maybe that’ll happen. Robert Wilson’s stroke of genius, in that moment, was to say fuck all that. Rather than explaining particle physics or trying to sweep its inexplicability under the rug, Wilson seized all the weirdness, abstraction, and complexity of the field in his hands and balloon-animaled it into a patriotic virtue. This shit is so impractical and hard—ran the core of his argument—its payoffs so far away and uncertain, that there’s not another nation on the planet that would dream of spending a dollar on it, let alone the nine blundred quintillion dollars I’m here to ask from you today.

It was an approach that worked brilliantly, right up until it didn’t. In 1987, no less orange-skinned a creationist than President Ronald Reagan was persuaded to support something called the Superconducting Super Collider, a $4.4 billion, fifty-four-mile-long behemoth that would have seen physics comfortably into the twenty-first century. Construction duly began outside Waxahachie, Texas, but then in 1993, with the projected budget now swollen to $11 billion and amid reports that the SSC’s design team had blown $56,000 on potted "tropical" plants and a further $24,000 on two massive Christmas parties, Congress pulled the plug, leaving fifteen miles of purpose-built accelerator tunnel to crumble and crack in the Texas sun like the rodeo dreams of an area farmhand or the freckle-dusted beauty of the waitress who loves him.

The SSC’s scrapping really left a mark, emotionally, on the global physics community. Many had just spent a whole chapter of their working lives either building it or writing papers about what it might find, and now all of that work was for naught. Perhaps worst of all: The SSC’s budget ended up going to fund something called the International Space Station, a sexy, crowd-pleasing bimbo of a project with only a fig leaf of scientific purpose. Whereas the SSC had been due to probe reality at its deepest level, tackling such nontrivial questions as "What is stuff made of?" and "Why does anything exist?," the basic mission of the ISS seemed to be to give U.S. taxpayers the thrill of living in science-fictiony Future Times—you know, like with space stations!—as well, presumably, as breaking down every now and again, requiring dramatic televised rescues by stubbled heroes of few words.

It was a kick in the face, was what it was, the scrapping of the SSC, but you don’t make it through physics grad school without learning how to learn a lesson. Although what follows is pure speculation, it seems pretty clear that after a period of retrenchment and wound licking, the tight-knit global fraternity of particle physicists got back to its feet, dusted itself off, and either figuratively or actually swore a pact that one way or another, by hook or by crook, this was not going to happen again. Next time they had a shot at building a major-league accelerator—and by criminy, there was going to be a next time—the project would not be left hostage to the whims of politicians. Next time, somehow, the public would be brought on board. Cabdrivers, barbers, waitresses, people’s mothers... literally everyone would be made to appreciate that the Great Machine under construction was every bit as glamorous and future-y as some chintzy two-toilet space station, and that riding on its success or failure were epic stakes rivaling those of the most summery and blockbusting of Hollywood summer blockbusters.

Oh, and they would be made to appreciate these things—and here was the great game-changing innovation—even it if none of them were true.

There’s nothing wrong with the coffee machines at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland. They don’t look like much from the outside—well, they look like ordinary low-rent coffee-vending machines—but should you happen to sidle up to one of them and fumble into it any of the tiny lightweight foreign coins, a soft deposit of which has now accumulated along the seam of your right rear trouser pocket, then magical things will start to happen. Not immediately. Nothing at all will happen immediately. But then, just as you’re starting to wonder if perhaps the machine would like another coin, there comes this noise... a great churning, aspirated sort of noise like something ancient clearing its throat... and from somewhere deep in its innards the machine will hawk up into its vending chamber a little brown plastic cup containing not only (a) a stout plastic swizzle stick, already in there magically somehow, but also (b) a hot portion of the oiliest, most flavorsome, and frankly strongest liquid rocket fuel you’ve ever tasted. Three or four of them little coffees, I was able to ascertain on a press trip to the Large Hadron Collier, and for a period of up to twenty minutes things are fine. The tedium lifts. The clouds of ennui part. The dingy corridors of CERN seem to glitter and seethe with all the whizzing subatomic doodads that all the people in all the offices are always talking about... . But then it wears off and things aren’t fine again. Things aren’t fine again at all.

See, like everyone else who reads the newspaper and watches the television, I had formed the impression over the preceding decade that there was something exciting happening there in the ground beneath the Swiss-French border. A giant machine was under construction, I had been led to believe—indeed, the largest, most complex, and most powerful machine that mankind would ever have built. Once the machine was finished and switched on, according to media reports, it would consume as much electricity as the entire neighboring metropolis of Geneva and use it to slam "protons" together with sufficient force to manufacture black holes, cause explosions hotter than core of the sun, and re-create the Big Bang so that this time scientists could watch and take notes. The risks of the projects were negligible, they assured us. Negligible but extremely cool. Among the various things that almost certainly wouldn’t happen were the planet being eaten by a black hole, time itself starting to run backwards, the whole universe being canceled out by the sudden hernia-like intrusion of some kind of anti-universe... It was all very thrilling. These were the kinds of apocalyptic fates that previously only the lantern-jawed heroes of comic-book-based films had been able to save the world from, narrowly. Now here they were about to not quite happen in real life!

Oh, and it got better. The stated purpose of building this giant Doomsday Machine in the ground outside Geneva was to hunt an elusive and unimaginably tiny particle called "the Higgs." As with the Holy Grail or the Loch Ness Monster, people had been searching for the Higgs for a very long time, apparently, and as with the Ark of the Covenant, it was thought to contain the Answers to Everything. Finding the Higgs, they told us, would answer the question of why there is mass in the universe, why anything and everything has substance and exists, hence its controversial nickname, "the God Particle." The actual physics of it was laughably beyond the reach of anyone first learning about the Higgs in a newspaper or from the TV, but it didn’t matter. Just as you don’t need to know what’s glowing inside Ving Rhames’s briefcase to enjoy Pulp Fiction, you didn’t need to know what the Higgs boson actually was to become invested in humanity’s efforts to find it.

This reporter didn’t, anyway. I’m a sucker for epic quests of any description, and as a consequence it was in a state of both childlike and childish excitement that I arrived to take the LHC’s measure for myself.

The excitement didn’t last very long. CERN’s sprawling campus outside Geneva looks and smells like it hasn’t been painted or even mopped since about 1979 and is generally not a very glamorous place. Physicists dress like shit, for one thing, as if they’ve galloped straight through a Walmart on a mighty steed, haphazardly spearing T-shirts and sweatpants from the racks with a heavy lance and spend their days performing dull, repetitive tasks that would chap the ass of a Foxconn worker to the bone. Entering any of the dozen or so control rooms dotting the LHC’s vast, drab circumference, one can almost literally hear the layers of stratified boredom crunching beneath one’s feet, and smell the stale yawns of 10,000 graveyard shifts, like a whiff of gangrene and gunpowder on an old Civil War battlefield.

And fair enough, I remember thinking, after one long morning in a control room watching the Large Hadron Collider slowly ramp itself up to collision velocity... then slowly ramp itself down again just to prove that it could. The wholesale absence of cheap thrills in physics only went to show that something important must be going on here. These were the smartest people in the world, after all. Each of them could, if he or she chose, be padding around a penthouse duplex in footie pajamas, running a hedge-fund empire from their iPhone while using the other hand to experiment with reverse-spherified squid-ink raviolini. But they weren’t. Each of them was here instead, in the unlovely suburbs of Geneva, riding to work in a shitty Citro&#xEB;n1 and an "Abibas" T-shirt to spend the 11 p.m.-to-7 a.m. shift staring at a screen and remaining mindful of the Post-it note’s instruction to "Call Gary at home if there’s a problem." Much as some subatomic particles are never glimpsed directly, but have their existence deduced from the spray of lesser particles into which they decay, so the importance and urgency of the LHC’s mission, I decided, could be inferred from these depressingly low ceilings and that guy over there’s "Planet Mollywood" sweatshirt.

I still think that’s true, for the record. Witnessing the sheer drudgery of modern physics up close gave me a new respect for the field and the people who toil in it, and it’s a respect that has endured.

It turns out not to be actually all that large, for one thing, the Large Hadron2 Collider. The circular tunnel that houses it does measure some seventeen miles in circumference, yes, and should you choose to walk from one side to the other, as I did, you should allow at least two hours for the journey. But it’s not as if for all that time you’re stepping over cogs and machete’ing your way through bushels of wiring. No, you’re just walking through the outskirts of Geneva.

But... but you’re being a dick, I hear you say. I’ve seen cross sections of the Large Hadron Collider, and it’s both huge and very cool. It’s like a... giant metal donut... the size of an apartment building... with all sorts of crazy... stuff all over it.

Yeah. No, it isn’t. I know the photos you’re talking about. For a good few years there, pretty much every magazine article about the LHC came illustrated with the same gorgeous splash-page photo of a humongous metal donut dripping with supercooled pipes and arrays of colored magnets, a few tiny human figures in white dust-suits taking readings from dials, and generally looking like the fucking Death Star at Christmas. Those donut-shaped contraptions do exist. I’ve seen them with my own eyes, but they are not the Large Hadron Collider. Those things are the particle detectors, a.k.a. "the experiments," and while they are indeed on the huge side (though this is simply so they can track the path of flying particles over a greater distance, not because they’re applying or containing any of the terrifying cosmic forces you may have heard about), there are only four of them, taking up approximately zero percent of the Collider’s vast circumference. For the remaining roughly 100 percent of those seventeen miles, the Large Hadron Collider is just a pipe, a boring-looking pipe, maybe two feet across, lying in a boring-looking tunnel. Ceci est une pipe, René Magritte would probably have remarked, hiding a yawn behind his fist, had you somehow convinced him to take a break from his exciting life making dorm-room art to come take a look at some science thing in a tunnel.

1. Oh sweet Krishna the fucking cars these people drive. At one point just before dawn, during a break waiting for something dull to happen, I blundered my way outside...only to be startled awake by the blinding shittiness of the vehicles parked there. Even adjusting for this being Europe, it was a woeful scene. Row upon row of frail, rusting hulks formerly held together with thick lead paint in the depression pastels of Alpine lobotomy clinics, now duct-taped and bungee-corded to within spitting distance—most of it incoming, I rather fear—of being roadworthy. I’m no sheltered little violet, reader. I’ve been around the block and seen things. I am aware, for instance, that sometimes when a man is down on his luck, he will substitute a bent coat hanger for his broken radio antenna while he sources a low after-market spare. Not before the CERN parking lot, though, had I seen a bent coat-hanger filling in for a steering-wheel—though I could have been mistaken; the Saran Wrap of the windshield was doing strange things with the light.

2. I’ve had it confirmed to me by Nobel laureates that even at the very highest levels of physics the only way anyone ever types the word "hadron" is with the ten-keystroke sequence: H; A; R; D; Backspace; Backspace; D; R; O; N. It seems that’s just how we’re wired, we people.

Now, do not mistake me. That tunnel itself really is quite something, and charges of dickitude might fairly be leveled if one didn’t doff one’s cap even slightly to the men who dug it. Five years it took them, which isn’t bad at all when you factor in that the thing had to be seventeen miles long, buried 300 feet underground, and pass, in a millimetrically perfect circle, beneath the city of Geneva with all its plumbing and shit. Impressive stuff, no question about it, and one might even be tempted to argue that on the strength of its containing tunnel alone, the LHC deserves its frequent mentions as the glittering pinnacle to date of man’s prowess in the art of making stuff... .

But that temptation is to be resisted, because it turns out they didn’t dig the tunnel for the Large Hadron Collider. Mere hours after my arrival in Geneva, slurping my first of them little coffees from the machine while exploring the underlit CERN visitors center, I gleaned from a backlit Perspex info poster that the LHC’s famous tunnel was excavated back between 1983 and 1988 to house a different particle accelerator, an identically huge machine known as the "Large Electron-Positron collider," a.k.a. the LEP.

What happened to the LEP? Why didn’t it get built? That was my question, too, and the answer, I was shocked to learn, is that nothing happened to it. It did get built. Not only did it get built, but the goddamn thing fucking ran, perfectly happily, doing almost exactly what the LHC is doing now, for eleven productive years, from 1989 to 2000. If people like you and me and have never heard of the LEP, that’s only because it was designed and built before the traumatic axing of the SSC and before physics, in a panic, decided to start selling particle-hunting to the general public like it was a goddamn monster-truck event.

As for the vaunted power of the LHC, that too turned out to be mainly hype. Yes, pound for pound the energy released by the collision of two protons can rival the intensity of the Big Bang or be hotter than the core of the sun, but that’s because it’s all squeezed down to a tiny point. What that energy also turns out to be equal to, however, in absolute terms, is the energy released by the head-on collision of a few mosquitoes flying into each other, nonfatally, at normal mosquito flying speed. "Wow," I said to the tour guide who told me this, and yeah, I think I probably did look a bit disappointed. "That’s not very much."

"Yes, it is," she said, nodding at me in an encouraging way. "It really is."

Here’s the thing, though: It actually isn’t. It really isn’t very much energy at all. And in regard to the dodgy proposition that the LHC running at full steam consumes as much electricity as the entire city of Geneva, which was almost certainly media hype rather than actual science to begin with, I would urge you first to spend a Friday evening in that desolate metropolis, feeling your way about its darkened streets in search of warm food and entertainment, before you decide how impressed you’re going to be by that.

Which brings me, finally, to the fucking Higgs boson. Where to begin with this fucking thing.

It came as news to me, for starters, I have to say, there on the ground in Geneva, that the act of finding the Higgs, if it did occur, would be quite as drawn-out and tedious as it turned out to be. Early on in my visit, I happened to ask a CERN person what the odds were of them finding the Higgs, you know, while I was there, and after laughing literally in my face, the guy informed me that it didn’t work like that. If they ever even did find the Higgs, he told me, there would be no exciting Moment of Discovery. No ponytailed hottie on the graveyard shift was going to glance at her screen mid-yawn and drop her Red Bull in recognition. No craggy Michael Caine-ish administrator would answer the phone at 4 a.m., then grapple for his spectacles and sit bolt upright as Susan Sarandon, here in the role of his wife, croaked, "Darling, what is it?" in her frilly camisole. No, if the Higgs were ever found, the man told me, it was going to happen with pulse-retarding slowness as data points steadily accrued upon a graph and a committee inched its way around to holding the kind of low-key gingerly press conference we saw last month. If in fact a film were ever made about the Finding of the Higgs, the man concluded—and I’m paraphrasing here—Michael Bay would not necessarily be one’s first choice of director, despite all the explosions and mega-engineering involved. Indeed, that honor might fall more naturally into the lap of Michael motherfucking Leigh.

Dispirited by this news, I retreated to my hotel room with a bottle of bubble bath, one of Chivas Regal, and a sack of physics textbooks to try and get my head a little further around it. What I learned there would underwhelm me, underwhelm me to my very core, though explaining why is going to require some actual physics.

There is a common misconception that supercolliders like the LHC find particles by smashing things apart, the same way you might hurl a friend’s watch at the wall to see what’s inside it. This did use to be the case back in the early days, when we were still trying to see what, if anything, was inside an atom, but we are way beyond that now. A modern accelerator like the LHC makes particles out of thin air, which it can do because air—or even empty space—isn’t as thin as it appears. See, the universe turns out to be filled with a number of invisible "fields," like vast three-dimensional bedsheets stretching from one end of space to the other, and just as you can make a wrinkle in a bedsheet by flicking it with your fingernail, you can make a field temporarily thicken into a particle by hitting it with a very intense explosion. Why would you bother doing that? For two reasons: one, to prove that the field exists; two, to find out what the field is like. Just as the depth and shake of the wrinkle you make by flicking a bedsheet can tell you whether the sheet is made of rubber, satin, or even sateen, so the shape and the size of a subatomic particle can tell you a lot about the field of which it is sort of a part.

Since about 1940 or so, this is what physicists have been doing, essentially: building ever larger mechanical fingers with which to flick harder and harder at the great tangle of invisible sheets that surrounds us, and since about 1960 or so a consensus has gradually formed as to how many different sheets there are, how they’re wrapped, and what they’re made of, etc. That theory is called "the Standard Model," and one part of it was supplied in 1964 by a guy called Peter Higgs. Prior to ’64, it had been observed, as it were, that while several of the tangled bedsheets making up our reality behaved in some respects like a very thin lightweight fabric—gossamer, say—the wrinkles produced in them by our flicking were much shallower than they should have been, as if the sheets were actually made of something heavier. Higgs’s suggestion—again, as it were—was that lying just beyond the sheets, there might be a blanket, causing the sheets not to dent so deeply when we flicked them. Oh yeah, said people in the physics community. That might be it, and a new era of even harder flicking began, in hopes of putting a dent in the blanket itself, thus proving it existed and that the Standard Model’s theory of what the other sheets were made of and how they were tangled was correct.

Flash forward to 2009, however, and we find Israeli actress Ayelet Zurer, playing a hot lady physicist in Ron Howard’s appalling Angels Demons, trying to explain the Higgs to Tom Hanks and a roomful of skeptical Vatican officials. She and her colleagues at the Large Hadron Collider are "studying the origins of the universe, to try to isolate what some people call ’the God Particle.’ "

"Gott... Particle?" sneers Stellan Skarsg&#xE5;rd, visibly shaken at finding himself in a film even worse than Mamma Mia!

"What we call it isn’t important," says Zurer with a dismissive swish of her hot hair. "It’s what gives all matter mass. The thing without which we could not exist."

Films are generally pretty slapdash when it comes to science, but not in this case. Zurer’s little speech could have lifted almost verbatim from the science pages of any reputable newspaper over the last decade or so, or from the Associated Press, which as recently as last month hailed the Higgs as "the key to understanding why matter has mass."

And the thing is this: It just isn’t true. If I read those physics textbooks correctly, the Higgs field doesn’t give every fundamental particle its mass, just some of them. Indeed, from the moment Peter Higgs first proposed the field in 1964, to the nonmoment they almost-confirmed its existence over the past year, it has never been thought to account for more than 1 percent of all the mass in the universe. That’s right. One percent, which any mathematician can tell you is just not very much. Yes, it may be thought of as a blanket mid up in the tangle of sheets that surrounds us, but it’s only mid up with some of the sheets. It isn’t some ultimate Counterpane of Reality, as we’d rather been led to believe. Is it "the thing without which we could not exist"? No, it is a thing without which we could not exist, and down at the subatomic level there’s literally a buttload of them.

No, the Higgs only became as famous as it did because physicists couldn’t fucking find it. For half a century they were stymied by its nondiscovery, like a man attempting a crossword puzzle who, after some brisk early progress, finds himself hung up on a nine-letter word for a piece of cutlery beginning with F. The man becomes obsessed. The clue becomes his white whale. He racks his brain, ignores his wife, and in the evenings, drinking, tells sympathetic barmen that the fate of the entire puzzle hangs on his being able solve this one clue... which is sort of true, kinda... . But then, one day, he does solve it—fishknife—and readdressing the puzzle after a celebratory trip to the bathroom, he finds that fishknife has shed its mantle of grandeur and now it’s the unsolved 80 percent of the puzzle that commands his attention, most urgently the five-letter word for a "tribal drum" descending from the central K of fishknife....

As for the term "God Particle," Ayelet Zurer’s conflicted discomfort in Angels Demons was also very true to life. Some twenty minutes into the lo-fi churning of Prince’s Black Album, a voice can be heard to mutter the words For someone who can’t stand them TV dinners, you sure eat enough of them motherfuckers, and for some twenty years after the term’s 1993 first appearance, as the title of a pop physics book by one Leon Ledermann, an eerily similar dynamic obtained between physicists and the term "the God Particle." In interviews and press conferences, they were adamant and unanimous that they hated the term... yet somehow they never missed a chance to bring it up, if only to state again for the record, just one more time, how much they hated it.

Which would have made a fiendish kind of sense, when you think about it, given the other efforts under way to amp up the sexiness of the quest for the Higgs by any means necessary. Scientists know what we think of them at this point, and they’re smart enough, being scientists, to have figured out how to exploit that reputation for their own ends. They know as well as we do that when a scientist in a movie takes offense at someone’s use of the term "time machine" and starts peeveishly adjusting his spectacles and explaining that it’s not a time machine per se but actually blahbitty blahbitty quantum space dimensions blah, it means that not only has he invented a time machine, but it’s a fucking good one. So it was with the so-called "so-called ’God Particle.’ " The more we were told how loathed, how reviled, how detested the term was in the Corridors of Science, the more excited we shitheads in the lay community became. None of which is to suggest that physicists did like the term, I should stress. I think it’s probably true, as Guardian science correspondent Ian Sample puts it in his book on the Higgs, that the particle’s "grandiose" nickname is "one of the most, if not the most, derided in the history of physics, " and that "few things unite physicists more than their disdain for the name." All I’m suggesting is that maybe the term’s value as a marketing tool did not go unnoticed by those in the know, and that maybe something of a double game was being played with it. I’m sorry, what’s that? You want the title of Mr. Sample’s book so you can check that I’ve rendered the preceding quotations accurately and not taken them out of context? Not a problemo. Published by Virgin Books at 320 pages, with an ISBN reference number of 0753522128, that would of course be Massive: The Hunt for the God Particle.3

Anyway, it’s all behind us now, by which I mean it’s all, or almost all of it, still in front of us. The Higgs may have been, as we were endlessly told, the "final piece" of the Standard Model’s puzzle, but what we were told somewhat less endlessly was that the Standard Model itself is really just one small, early piece of a bigger puzzle of huge but still unknown dimensions. The most deflating moment of my generally grim trip to Geneva was listening to Rolf-Dieter Heuer, the ABBA-looking dude who made the Higgs announcement last month, coolly discussing CERN’S plans for the next generation of gigantic particle accelerators. As Heuer spoke, I felt a tiny frown appear on my forehead, and glancing around the CERN media center, I observed the same tiny frown appearing on the foreheads of the other less-well-informed members of the global media. I’m guessing that they, like me, had thought that, you know, this was it: that once the world’s largest machine had found the last undiscovered particle, we’d be getting out of the game, as it were, vis-&#xE0;-vis particles. Sure, there would be other mysteries to solve, other voyages of understanding upon which humanity would boldly embark... but surely we didn’t know what those were yet. Could it really be possible that in ten, twenty, and a hundred years we’d still be accelerating particles around circular tracks and smashing them together in search of yet more particles?

Yes, it seems. That’s exactly what we’re going to do. Now that the Higgs has been found, the next order of business is to study its properties and then, based on our findings, begin the search for what’s always described as an exciting "new family" of particles, those predicted by the theory of "supersymmetry." Something like that anyway. Something involving finding more particles, and then even more particles after that.

The big question, of course, is whether we the public are going to feel like paying for it. We’re not as rich as we used to be, and it’s by no means clear we have the emotional energy left to work ourselves into a lather again over another supposedly crucial particle, let alone a whole family of them. We could have sworn we just spent many billions of dollars building a Doomsday Machine so scientists could find the God Particle. Unless they can also discover a whole new family of superlatives to dazzle us with, some time is probably going to have to pass before we open our wallet that wide again.

Then again, maybe not as much time as all that. The world has changed quite a lot, frankly, since 1969, when Robert Wilson shattered the backboard up on Capitol Hill. The world has changed quite a lot even since the early 1990s, when the mighty avalanche of hype and bullshit about the Large Hadron Collider first started to rumble. The world is faster now than it used to be, as well as weirder and more confusing, and while, yes, I know you can find that precise sentiment expressed on cave walls in the Great Rift Valley and slabs of cuneiform in the British Museum, as well as in every single novel written by a sensitive man between 1914 and the present day, it happens to be true, now, in a way that it didn’t used to be. The once unpicturable abstractions of quantum physics, things entangling over distance, blinking in and out of existence for no apparent or even actual reason... they don’t seem so abstract anymore. The news that we ourselves exist briefly in a boundaryless soup of invisible entities, ourselves gigantic specks of nothingness, flickering and excruciated between sickening infinities of scale... it no longer feels so much like news. Reality is a seething mess, we’ve come to appreciate, if not quite yet to accept, and what was formerly the banality of being alive, of drawing breath, of our effortless navigation from one moment to the next, has lately come to feel every bit as weird and wondrous and dizzying as physicists and the makers of trippy short animated films always insisted it was.

Indeed, if I can revive and extend an earlier analogy, I would submit that our general confusion has now deepened to the point that we really do feel, all of us collectively, like a man coming to after a blackout to find his head wrapped up in a welter of strange bedsheets. And if the physicists mean what they say? That with just a few more giant fingers built, just a few centuries more of diligent flicking, we might find out once and for all what’s up with those sheets? What they’re made of, what kind of thread count we’re talking about, in what precise configuration they are tangled about us? Well, all of a sudden that project doesn’t sound so much like a waste of money. Because as anyone who’s ever woken up in that particular situation can tell you, it is only after one has solved the Mystery of the Sheets that one can properly address the bigger questions. Whose house is this. What happened last night. And how the fuck are we supposed to get home.

and look here’s the thing..." If so, that only proves my point. I could expand on that a bit, but this is already my third longish footnote, and if you think I’m ending up like poor David Foster Wallace, you can go fuck yourself. _

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